oil
61 x 50.75 in
Kamis, 05 Januari 2012
Dorothea Sharp - By the blue sea
oil on canvas
25 x 29.9 in. / 63.5 x 76 cm.
Having studied and painted in France, Dorothea Sharp was clearly aware of the work of Claude Monet and the Impressionists and her masterful use of light and shade echoes the techniques of her French counterparts. Her choice of subject matter and tender treatment of the children who appear so often in her work is reminiscent of the work of the renowned women Impressionists, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassat.
The Editor of The Artist praised Dorothea Sharp as 'one of England's greatest living woman painters', and commented upon the particular attraction of her art: 'No other woman artist gives us such joyful paintings as she. Full of sunshine and luscious colour, her work is always lively harmonious and tremendously exhilarating ... the chief attractions of Miss Sharp's delightful pictures are her happy choice of subjects, and her beautiful colour schemes. Rollicking children bathed in strong sunlight, playing in delightful surroundings, her subjects appeal because they are based on the joy of life. And she presents them equally happily, with a powerful technique which enables her to make the most of her wonderful sense of colour' (Harold Sawkins, Dorothea Sharp, ROI, RBA, The Artist, April 1935, pp. 55-8).
Born at Dartford in Kent, it was not until the age of twenty-one that Sharp seriously took up painting. The death of an uncle, who left her one hundred pounds, enabled her to study at the art school run by C. E. Johnson, RI, in Richmond, Surrey. She then attended the Regent Street Polytechnic where she was greatly encouraged by Sir George Clausen and Sir David Murray, visiting critics to the Polytechnic Sketch Club.
It was in Paris that Sharp achieved her complete artistic development. There she studied under Castaluchio, 'from whom she states she learnt all she knows'. It was the work of Claude Monet, however, that was to have a profound and lasting effect on her art, resulting in the highly impressionistic and spontaneous style that she was to adopt for the rest of her life.
Sharp exhibited regularly throughout her career at many institutions including the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artist, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Society of Women Artists of which she acted as President for four years. She held her first one-woman show at the Connell Gallery in 1933, which proved a great success and was constantly attended by admiring visitors.
Although primarily a painter of pictures, Sharp also designed posters and covers for magazines, and wrote a series of articles on Oil Painting, which first appeared in The Artist, and were later published by James Connell and Sons.
Dame Laura Knight - Lady in a blue dress
Price Realized
£8,125
($12,553)
signed and dated 'Laura Knight 1915' (lower right)
oil on canvas
14 x 10 in. (35.6 x 25.4 cm.)
Rabu, 04 Januari 2012
Dame Laura Knight - A Girl Reading, probably Florence Carter Wood (later Mrs Alfred Munnings)
Price Realized
£181,250
($280,031)
signed 'Laura Knight' (lower left)
pencil and watercolour heightened with bodycolour and with scratching out on paper
24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm.)
A young woman, in profile is reading a letter in a sunlit landscape; she wears a white blouse and her auburn hair is pinned under a broad-brimmed straw hat, its red ribbon falling over her left shoulder. On closer inspection, spots of sunlight piercing through the weave of the hat fall on to her face - a delicate observation, only possible if the picture had been painted in the open air. Behind her, fields stretch into the distance and overhead, a brilliant blue sky is lightly covered with cloud, recalling a typical summer's day on the Penwith Peninsula. 'In this region' Arthur Symons proclaimed, there was 'an air of dreams, at once formidable and mysterious, every hour of the day has its own charm and character, which change visibly and in surprising ways' (A. Symons, 'At the Land's End', Cities, Sea-Coasts and Islands, 1918, London, p. 269. Originally written for The Saturday Review in the summer of 1905).
Although Laura Knight was an accomplished painter in watercolour by the time she moved from Staithes in Yorkshire to Newlyn, her use of the medium flourished in Cornwall. She found it a convenient and portable sketching medium that not only supported her larger oil paintings, but also had unique qualities of its own. She was showing regularly at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, an old society whose fortunes revived in the Edwardian years. The previous year, Knight had been elected as a member and her exhibits of 1910, including A Girl Reading, revealed the confidence she now felt. It was a period characterized by Norman Garstin as one of 'opulent colour and sensuous gaiety' (Norman Garstin, 'The Art of Harold and Laura Knight', The Studio, vol. LVII, December 1912, p. 195).
It is possible that the model for A Girl Reading is Phyllis Gotch, the daughter of fellow Newlyn painters, Caroline and Thomas Cooper Gotch, whose fancy dress parties the Knights attended soon after their arrival in Newlyn. Such was their friendship that Harold painted Phyllis wearing Laura's blue silk dress on at least two occasions - one entitled The Reader, shows her posing en plein air, reading a letter (Harold Knight, The Reader, 1910, unlocated). However, a more likely sitter is Florence Carter Wood (Harold Knight, Florence Carter Wood, c. 1910-11, Private Collection). Laura and Florence became close friends when both posed for Harold in Afternoon Tea and The Sonnet, his Royal Academy pictures of 1910 and 1911. Florence married Alfred Munnings in 1912, but her mental condition led her to commit suicide two years later.
In 1936, Laura Knight described her pictures of this period as 'an expression of joie de vivre from which I was suffering. An ebullient vitality made me want to paint the whole world and say how glorious it was to be young and strong' (Laura Knight DBE, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, 1936, vol 2, London, 1941, p. 193). This sense of a world viewed through fresh eyes is apparent in the present work.
KMc.
Wilfred Gabriel de Glehn - Jane Emmet de Glehn by a stream, Val d'Aosta
Price Realized
£157,250
($242,951)
oil on canvas
24 7/8 x 29 7/8 in. (63 x 76 cm.)
In August 1907 the de Glehns joined John Singer Sargent and his entourage at Purtud in the Val d'Aosta. Every morning, according to Jane Emmet de Glehn's letter to her mother, they would return to a favourite sunny spot on the edge of a pine forest where Sargent's nephews, Jean-Louis, Guillaume and Conrad Ormond would bathe in an icy brook. 'The children look so jolly rushing around the sunny meadow, naked and rolling in the cristal [sic] water'. Despite her evident pleasure in the scene Jane was posing for Sargent in mornings and Wilfrid 'by the brook in a white dress, parasol etc' in afternoons - 'he did a lovely sketch and is going on with it today', she wrote. While posing she caught a cold, but any discomfort she might have felt was put to one side as she sat by the babbling stream and listened, every few minutes to 'the roar of an avalanche' (letter dated 13 August 1907, Emmet Family Papers, Archives of American Art).
De Glehn's resulting canvases are among the most impressionistic works he painted. 'His impression is the impression, to be carried through and transferred to us in the final stage of the work', according to T. Martin Wood in 1912. We can therefore assume that these 'out-of-doors figure-pictures in which women in fairy-white-dresses enter into the life of a summer day' were not retouched in the studio. Wood compared his work to that of Watteau but found de Glehn lighter and freer than his eighteenth-century counterpart, partly as a result of the lifting of social constraints (T. Martin Wood, 'The Paintings of Wilfrid G von Glehn', The Studio, vol. LVI, 1912, pp. 4, 7). However, there was an added point in the discussion of where this Impressionism might lead. Should it be fundamentally an offshoot of Realism and Naturalism, or should it be about the decorative? Was it the language for dreams and imaginings? De Glehn would answer these questions in a number of fascinating ways. (Dr Jane Hamilton, In Search of a Golden Age, 2008, Studio Publication CCXXXIX, p. 26).
At least two canvases were painted on this particular occasion. One, Jane by the Stream, Purtud, Val d'Aosta, (1907, David Messum, c. 1994) shows Jane in profile, without a parasol, but seated by a darker, deeper stretch of river, flowing off to the right (L. Wortley, 1989, p. 30-1; K. McConkey 1995, p. 131; see also www.deglehn.com/alps_1.htm). The present viewpoint, in full sunlight, shows the grassy bank that features in Sargent family photographs (W. Adelson et al., Sargent Abroad, Figures and Landscapes, New York, 1997 p. 69).
Comparisons with the work of De Glehn's companion on the same occasion are apposite. During this particular summer, Sargent had reached the momentous decision to reduce his portrait commissions and on the banks of the mountain stream, with members of his family dressed in exotic costumes, he returned to the impressionism of his youth. The De Glehns were congenial companions and Wilfrid, a chess partner. So close were the two artists that, Sargent painted a watercolour at a location near that of the present work (Brook among Rocks, 1907, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of Elsie Faye Loeffler). The large triangle boulder at the top edge of the watercolour appears in both pictures. Others, such as the splendid Dolce Far Niente (fig. 1) were executed close by.
As the weather grew colder, Sargent and the de Glehns travelled south, briefly passing through Florence before spending much of September at the Grand Hotel at Frascati where they painted in the gardens of the Villa Torlonia, and where Sargent executed his celebrated joint portrait of the de Glehns by the fountain (The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, 1907, Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection).
With the present work, Jane clearly felt that Wilfrid had attained something of Sargent's lucidity. Having trained at the Art Students League in New York and under Frederick MacMonnies in Paris, hers was a practiced eye. On their travels, she too would demonstrate her prowess in careful pencil drawings of friends and vivid oil sketches, matching those of her husband. In a sense therefore, Jane Emmet de Glehn by a Stream, Val d'Aosta is the by-product of a unique artistic collaboration involving muse, master and painter.
KMc.
Philip Alexius de Laszlo - Mrs Herbert Asquith, later Countess of Oxford and Asquith
Price Realized
£11,250
($17,381)
signed and dated 'P. A [?] LASZLO/1909' (lower right)
oil on canvas
36¼ x 28 in. (92 x 71 cm.)
Margot Asquith married Herbert Asquith in 1894. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1905 and Prime Minster in 1908, holding that post until 1916. Born the daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, she was a prominent member of the intellectual circle known as 'The Souls', and was noted for her charm, unconventionality and wit. She was a great admirer of de László, and hoped that her husband would also be painted by him (regrettably this never happened). Facing the need for funds, she sold the portrait at Christie's in the middle of the war, and died two years thereafter, aged 81.
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